This year’s Blue Jays 2012 season opener preview video gave me them, as it does every year. Still can’t find a sportsbook that will let me place a futures bet on them finishing 3rd or better in the AL East this year, but will throw my money at that bet if it opens up anywhere!
Back in 2006 on hot tip from Hutsie, I opened an account with the World Sports Exchange, or ‘WSEX’ as it’s abbreviated. Unlike other online sportsbooks at that time (and largely to this day), WSEX had an awesome spin to its in-play betting. It applied a little bit of Wall Street market mechanics to sports betting by letting you take a position on the outcome of a game while it’s in-progress through the buying and selling of ‘contracts’, which can be bought/sold in a game and are constantly re-priced based on the game state. I won’t bother explaining the nuances, other than to say it’s a fucking blast and great way to gamble. It’s a slightly more advanced concept, which is the only reason I can think of to explain why more sportsbooks haven’t adopted similar models.
Anyways, shortly after I started betting with WSEX, they launched a poker room called – fittingly – the World Poker Exchange, or WPEX. At that time, I was playing what could probably be described as an unhealthy amount of poker online, so naturally I moved some of my sportsbook balance over to the poker room to take it for a spin.
The unique thing about WPEX was that it was rake free, meaning that the house didn’t keep a cut of the action for itself. The rake is how poker rooms make money — keeping a small percentage of each hand in cash games. WPEX still collected the rake, but every Monday, it would transfer 100% of the rake back to player accounts, so it was effectively running its poker room pro bono. Some weeks I’d have a couple hundred bucks transferred to me playing $1-2 NL. It was the only online poker room doing that, so my best guess was the strategy was to attract new players to its room, and cross-promote the sportsbook in hopes that poker players would bring their sports betting action to WSEX. I know my WSEX sportsbook action went way up when I was playing in their poker room.
It was a typical loss leader strategy, which didn’t work so well after UIGEA started being enforced in 2010 and most of the American players disappeared from poker rooms pretty much overnight.
I remember loading up a table and it was just Canadians, Brits, an Scandinavians left in there. The party ended there for me, and many others I assume. Last month, I received an email from WSEX announcing that the World Poker Exchange was shutting down.
It went dark on February 15th with very little fanfare. Pretty much the polar opposite amount of drama compared to Full Tilt & the ilk’s shutdowns, actually.
Even though I haven’t played a game of poker online in probably 3 years now, it was a bit of bummer getting that email from them last month. I suppose the writing was on the wall, and it’s hardly the first poker room to fold, but the WSEX/WPEX brand holds sentimental value for me. Unfortunately for WPEX, sentimental value couldn’t pay their bills.
My World Poker Exchange tshirt
For some inexplicable reason, I still have a t-shirt that WPEX mailed me out of the blue one day probably 5 years ago. It was part of their campaign to promote the lucrative ‘rake free’ poker room. It being jammed in the back of my closet for 6 years probably didn’t do much to help spread the good word.
For a brief moment in the online poker time-space continuum, WPEX was a badass room to throw cards in. Bye WPEX!
Day one of the 2012 March Madness tournament has ended. Like millions of others, I’m staring at a bracket that plots my guesses as to which team will win each of the 63 games played in the tournament. Out of 16 games played today, I only got 11 right, which is right around the median for all entrants. Always aiming for the middle!
While my bracket will go down in a flaming heap of crap like it always does after the first couple days of tournament play, this year it will do so in a completely new setting. Instead of the usual bracket manager on CBSSports.com, I’m using an app on Facebook to manage my bracket and follow the tournament. It has all the usual stuff: auto-updating, printable brackets, groups, leaderboards, and live game scoreboards. Except unlike other brackets that offer a *theoretical* prize of $1million for a perfect bracket, this one offers a guaranteed $10,000 for the top bracket from all the people that enter one in the app. Considering it’s completely free to enter, that’s one of the better deals on Facebook these days when compared to the fact you have to pay real money for fake farm animals!
It even has “View From Vegas” videos with game previews and predictions:
*****
Okay, so I’m heavily biased.
While thousands of people are using this Facebook app to manage their brackets this year, I’m one of the handful of people that saw what it looked like last October:
What you see here is the William Hill $10K Bracket Challenge when we started developing it 5 months ago. Those color-coded cards on the office walls were the first incarnation of what people are seeing today. Functionality. Design requirements. Assumptions. External dependencies. Details of how the hell it’s all supposed to look and work. Luckily, we figured it all out and now I’m managing my bracket this year on an app we built.
The app was sponsored as a contest and sweepstakes by William Hill, a 77-year old company traded on the London Stock Exchange that happens to be Britain’s largest bookie. It’s a respected and trusted brand whose logo I’m proud to overlay on something we created.
*****
It was a fun project to conceive and create this app over the last few months, and it’s cool to see so many people using it to manage their brackets this year. It’ll also be great to award somebody $10,000 in cash for their bracket! Too bad I’m ineligible to win, not that my perfectly average bracket has a shot anyway…
I’ve tried the blog thing a couple times over the past 5 years. It didn’t stick (duh). I had this tendency to do anything I could to avoid actually writing on it. I’d switch WordPress themes every week. Install different widgets. Change around the categories that defined the phantom posts I’d written. In actual fact, I think I just had nothing to say.
Evidently though, I’m back to trying this writing thing again, and this is my new sandbox.
Welcome.
Probable recurring themes on this fine piece of Internet real estate include:
- Startups. I’ve been enamored with startups since 2007, when I attached the wheels to my first one. After said wheels fell off in 2008, I started my second one with Grant and Judd. We’ve been at it since. Things are going well… “well” meaning we haven’t died in the first couple years. And I’m not trying to be funny or cute or whatever; not dying is a legitimate success marker in my books. In fact, when you boil it down to one thing, that’s a CEO’s only job: making sure the company doesn’t die. And when you’re at the startup stage, death is all around you. But anyway. There’s a lot of road ahead of us, and each new day gives us a little more strength, confidence, and ability than the last. 2012 is going to be awesome, and I’m sure I’ll want to read about this later in life through the lens of my mind today. That requires me to write about it. Here I am.
- Sports Betting. I started buying Sports Action tickets when I was 17 while working at a local grocer that doubled as a lottery retailer. Here in British Columbia, the provincial government has a monopoly on betting and lotteries. The legal age to gamble on sports with our government bookie is 19, even though selling those tickets could be done by 17 year olds. I got sent to a mandatory retailer training course that introduced me to betting concepts like point spreads, parlays, and totals (thanks, BCLC!). The next day, I was betting on hockey games by printing my own tickets in the machine. I’m 30 now, and while I’m still shit at picking winners, I haven’t stopped betting. My company is called Bet Smart Media. It’s rooted in the gambling I’ve been doing since I was 17, and it’s my domain. We work with some of the leading sports betting brands in the world. My favorite roulette number is 15. I have an awesome job.
- Musings. That’s another word for whatever I want. I’m not necessarily intending on building an audience, so will politely decline the free advice issued by self-credentialed “social media experts” that say you should keep a blog narrow and focused. Between us, I’ll probably keep it fairly limited to stuff around startups and gambling and sports — in other words, the things I spend most of my time on. But I still reserve the right to spew on about whatever else might be on my mind. And spew there shall be.
- I turned 30 this year (though still get carded >97% of the time). My younger brother had his first kid this year, making me Uncle Jesse to boot (beat it, Stamos). I had a good friend pass away this year (who posthumously became the #1 individual fundraiser worldwide for the 2011 Movember campaign out of 854,490 people). 2011 gave me lots of reasons to stop and reflect, and here I emerge from it with a new sense of intrinsic motivation to write some things down.
- I regularly read of tons of blogs. After a while, I feel like I get to know authors pretty well through their writing, learning about their personalities and getting a sense of who they are as people. I’m no more interesting of a guy than anybody else, but if one felt compelled enough to want to get to know me passively, this will be a good place to do that. I’m going to be spending a lot of time in 2012 building new business relationships, and if I can accelerate courting phases by letting people get to know me through this blog, then great – especially if that means getting down to business quicker. Like Tom Petty says, the waiting is the hardest part.
- The last reason I think I’ll stick to it this time is because I’m in grave danger of Dilberting myself. Not that I consider myself a pointy-haired geek, but the reality is that almost all of my writing is business communication - emails, proposals, reports, etc. That comes with the turf, I guess, but I need an outlet to write a little more informally. I won’t say that my writing here will necessarily be creative, but at least I can drop a fucking F bomb from time to time without worry.